IT Professionals Largely Unfazed by Cloud Outages

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Major cloud outages grab headlines each time they occur, but most IT service management (ITSM) professionals aren’t losing sleep over it.

Help desk software maker ManageEngine and analyst firm ITSM.tools recently surveyed 300 technology professionals for a glimpse at what it’s like to work in today’s IT departments. After February’s massive Amazon Web Services (AWS), which affected several well-known websites and services, including Slack and Pinterest, only eight percent of respondents said the incident had a negative effect on their organization’s outlook toward cloud computing.

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Nearly a quarter (24 percent) said that the outage got them to think about the risks of placing their IT workloads on the cloud. For nearly half (47.4 percent) of those surveyed, it was a non-event. Just over 20 percent didn’t even know that the outage took place.

Another technology ITSM professionals don’t seem very concerned about is artificial intelligence (AI), at least in terms of it taking their jobs.

Between now and 2020, only 15.5 percent of respondents said they believe that AI will lead to a considerable reduction in IT staffing levels. Just over 44 percent expect some cuts, but not in significant numbers. Nearly a third (32.3 percent) said they don’t expect to AI to put them or their colleagues out of a job.

“So, in the main, the survey respondents don’t see AI as a major threat to IT jobs – with only 15 percent of respondents viewing the adoption of the new capabilities as a serious job killer,” stated the report. In many ways, AI can be seen as the next evolution of automation, following data center automation, ITSM-process workflow automation, and orchestration [by incorporating] ‘heavy thinking,’ especially through machine learning, to the existing ‘heavy lifting’ benefits of more traditional automation.”

Although most IT professionals don’t expect to lose their jobs to AI systems, many are expecting their jobs to get harder over the next couple of years.

Nearly 36 percent of those polled said they expect working in corporate IT to get tougher across all IT roles over the next three years. Another 46.4 percent believe that some IT roles will be more difficult to fulfill and nearly 15 percent expect no change.

The study also suggested that CIOs and other business leaders can do a better job of acknowledging the contributions their IT teams make to their organizations.

Nearly half (49.2 percent) of all respondents said that their efforts and value to the business are sometimes recognized, but not enough. Twenty-three percent go unrecognized while over a quarter (26.2 percent) said they received the acclaim they were looking for.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.